History meant nothing to me, until these two men created the phenomenal books Generations
and The
Fourth Turning (to learn more about Strauss and Howe, please visit them at
their main web site www.lifecourse.com.
Also, you can visit my generations page to see more of their work.) Once I began
delving into their work I became fascinated with American History. This page is
dedicated to ebooks in American History.

ebooks are a researchers dream. They are searchable and can be annotated with
ease. Take Adobe Acrobat for instance. (my
personal favorite). I can load an ebook in adobe and while I'm reading I can
highlight passages just like a regular book. The big difference being, when I'm
done with the ebook, I can tell Adobe to create a report based on my highlights.
Boom. In a few seconds I have all my notes in a consolidated report. I've
literally saved hours and hours of productivity time.

ebooks also provide a searching tool that is so vital in a researchers world;
the ability to search text quickly.
When I'm writing a paper or a book, I make statements that I usually want to
back up with hard evidence. Sure, there's times I can remember which author I need
to support my statement or which book the evidence is in. However, I
can't remember exactly where it is in the book. The result is having to search
manually through the book to look for the passage or the quote. Not my favorite
task. I consider it a waste of time because I know that there's a better
way.

I want to spend my time writing and reading. Not searching for a quote. With
ebooks, it's instantaneous. Plug in a few words that represent the evidence I'm
looking for and click search. Boom. There it is. Furthermore, I can cut and
paste it into my paper without having to type it. One of the many things a
researcher worries about is misquoting someone. With the cut n paste feature, it's
not possible to misquote anyone. And, again. it saves so much time.

Lastly, ebooks are so cheap at the moment, it's ridiculous. I just
bought 3000 for $29.95. Many are free. What I want to convey to you is that this
will not last. This is a cycle and the cycle will correct itself. Many new
inventions are given away or sold very cheaply to get people to try them or, like most ebooks that are in the
public domain there's no one that needs to collect royalties. Many people have tried this model on the internet since its
inception, especially software makers. That model is: Give it away for free. In
the case of software, that is changing. Many software writers have conformed to
the standard of giving away a 'lite' version or stripped down version of their
software. Then, they hope you'll buy the full version at later date. No
one knew that this would be the model back in the beginning of the Net. This model took
years to manifest. The same model is manifesting in articles and papers on the
net. Writers are giving you a piece of the article, then if you want to
subscribe to the web site or pay a nominal fee for the rest of the article, you
do. It's an upgrade.

The same will happen to ebooks, except in a different way.

Since the ebook itself is not proprietary, there are several things that will
probably take place. 1) It won't be about the books, it'll be about the table of
contents and the indexing. For example: Project
Gutenberg is a massive project. It's been in place since 1970. You can
read about it at their web site. It's quite fascinating. But, what this project has
enabled people to do is compile massive amounts of ebooks, burn them onto
CD-ROM's and sell them. Earlier I said I bought 3000 books for 29.95. That was
from this project. Someone collected them, burned them, and began selling them.
Then it explodes exponentially. A business opportunity is born that anyone can
do from their desk top.

What hasn't been done to these CD-ROM's full of ebooks, is comprehensive
organization. Something that can be used by researchers, teachers, business and
everyday users. When you buy the CD-ROM it is organized with the Gutenberg
index. Basically, you unzip the books and place them on your hard drive or just
access them from the CD-ROM as needed. How do you access them though? How are
you supposed to know what is what? Your given a searchable database. Put in the
author or the book and search. The result is found and the title of the book has
a corresponding number. Search again to find the number, because that's how all
the books are stored: by numbers, not authors or titles. This is
useless.

The true value will come from these databases when they are better organized.
But that takes time. Lots and lots and lots of time. I'm currently organizing
the 3000 books I bought. I'm doing 10 a day. I'll be done in three months. So,
now you see what I mean about the time. The value is in having a concise,
searchable and readable TOC and Index.

I have found some people who are selling ebooks on CD-ROM's, on the Internet.
They are usually categorized by subject. like, American History. They may have
400 or 100 or 800, titles. The ones worth buying are the ones that are already
in a searchable easy to read format and there aren't many of them. Moreover, the
interesting part is that the TOC and the Indexes are copyrighted! There's the
value!

Like I said, this cheap pricing will not last. I encourage you to get them
why the goings good. They will not be around 10-15 years from now at these
prices. I really wonder if it will even take that long.

This web page is dedicated to ebooks about American History.

Feel free to
download them for free. All books are in Text format and can be read with any
ebook reader or word processing software program.